School Choice in Ohio Defies Critics’ Cheap Caricature

A recent hit piece on educational-freedom efforts in the state willfully misrepresents the immense benefits Ohioans are seeing.

E ven before the devastating 2020 school closures inflicted upon America’s children, Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), the organization I lead in Columbus, Ohio, had one simple message to parents: Get your kids out of government schools.

This message didn’t make us very popular — especially with the teachers’ unions and their friends in the media. But even many conservatives and Christians balked, in those days, at such an aggressive call.

Yet the Covid school closures revealed two fundamental truths about today’s public education: dangerous woke ideology is being forced on children every day, often without parents’ knowledge and consent; and our government education system is academically failing millions of students, especially in our inner cities.

As America awakened to the crisis in our schools, a school choice revolution took off, empowering kids with state scholarship or voucher programs to attend the school of their choice. Twelve states now have universal school choice. In Ohio, we went from around 23,000 children in our school choice program to more than 155,000.

CCV’s call to break free of the failing government education system now seems less radical to many families across the country. Yet ideologues on the left still cannot cope with the idea that children might escape their grasp.

In what can best be described as a swing-and-miss hit piece, the New Yorker and the George Soros–funded ProPublica collaborated on a nearly 7,000-word winding journey through Ohio politics and CCV’s 40-plus year history in the former’s January issue. Their intent to delegitimize the school choice revolution was painfully obvious.

After spending the past six months attempting to contact me, chase down people from CCV’s past, and even buying a ticket to our annual Essential Summit — our October conference on how to put your faith into action that featured Ben Carson, Seth Dillon, and Kevin Roberts — Alec MacGillis published his story: “On a Mission from God: How Religious Schools Became a Billion Dollar Drain on Public Education.”

As a policy, I don’t grant interviews to activist organizations. While I speak with legacy media outlets regularly, even those with hard leftist bents, there is no practical difference between interviewing with ProPublica and doing an interview with the communications team from Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign. They are all nonprofit organizations with political agendas.

Nevertheless, ProPublica’s headline captured a grain of truth. Just like Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers, CCV is on a “Mission from God.”

We believe our effort to reform education is a calling from the Holy Spirit. But CCV is hardly unique in this call. In many ways, the drive to promote literacy and provide a quality education to children is as old as the Church itself.

As historian Tom Holland details in his book Dominion, it was the Catholic Church that first started promoting education for every child, regardless of socioeconomic status. And here in America, Baptist pastors pushed west to found new states like Ohio. They were clear about the importance of universal education and how crucial it is for every child to be able to read so they could access the eternal word of God.

So, yes: Our desire to provide every kid a quality education is deeply rooted in our faith. It’s rooted in our compassion for suffering children. And it’s deeply evangelical, because we have total confidence that the earnest pursuit of truth will lead humanity on a path towards knowing the Creator of all things seen and unseen.

The real story, which MacGillis refused to tell, is modern public education’s abject failure to educate kids in even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. It’s the story of the billions of dollars that are wasted every year on a failed education system that, as currently constructed, is incapable of serving America’s children.

The article frets about the nearly $1 billion spent on school choice programs in Ohio. Conveniently, it leaves out the fact that $230 million of that supports scholarship programs for children with special needs.

But beyond that, as the Fordham Institute recently reported, the New Yorker and ProPublica ignore that taxpayers spent $30 billion on Ohio public schools this past fiscal year. As Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill wrote, “Public schools enroll more students, but not anywhere near thirty times more students (it’s about ten times). Hence, on a per-pupil basis, public school funding is 2.8 times the [school choice scholarship] amount ($18,183 versus $6,521).”

What has all this investment bought taxpayers? Worse academics, and no path for righting the ship.

In 2013, 48 percent of Ohio fourth graders were proficient or better in mathematics and 37 percent were proficient or better in literacy, according to the National Assessment on Education Progress.

In 2022, the last time the report was released, 40 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math and 36 percent were proficient in literacy. This is despite the fact that taxpayers increased spending in government schools by 39 percent from 2013–2022.

The consistent failures of our public education system remind me of another Blues Brothers reference. Elwood brings his brother Jake back to his dumpy apartment in downtown Chicago, right by the train tracks. “How often does the train go by?” Jake asks.

“So often, you won’t even notice it,” says Elwood.

Our acceptance of the deterioration of public schools is so entrenched, we are simply numb to it.

This is a disaster. What makes the situation hopeless for many kids is that the teachers’ unions and the “experts” have no intention to fix the problem, let alone find a solution. All they know how to do is complain that they are underfunded and publish fake exposés whose best scoop, in the case of the rambling New Yorker piece, is that I am a “hip-hop enthusiast.”

Well, I’m sorry Ms. Jackson, I am for real. Today’s American public education system is a deepening pit that the New Yorker refuses to look in. Behind every statistic about the falling math and reading scores are hundreds of thousands of kids in Ohio, and millions across the country, who are losing their shot at the American dream because they can’t read.

While reporters are looking away, parents aren’t. They want options, and they want out.

Ohio lawmakers and leaders like Ohio Speaker of the House Matt Huffman, along with CCV and our Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN), are providing that path. The nearly 200 schools in OCEN are massively expanding each year. And churches are stepping up across Ohio to meet families’ biggest need — a place for their children to safely go to school and learn — by working with CCV to start full-time Christian schools in Sunday School classrooms that are empty during the week.

We’ve already launched two schools, and in the fall at least eight more will open.

These are the stories that need to be told. We are honest about the problems we face, but we’re also hopeful. We see people stepping up not just to help the kids in their community, but also to transform a broken system through school choice and innovation.

This is a mission from God worth undertaking.